1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording medium playback apparatus having the function of reading character codes recorded on a recording medium, and more particularly to a recording medium playback apparatus adapted to read character codes recorded along with audio playback digital data on a recording medium such as a CD, a DVD, or an MD.
2. Description of the Related Art
For example, in a CD (compact disc) that conforms to the CD-TEXT format, character data, for displaying the title of music recorded on each track, artist name, etc. on an operation panel, is recorded in addition to the audio playback digital data recorded on a conventional CD.
The character data is recorded in the lead-in area of the CD, and when the TOC (Table of Contents) information recorded in the lead-in area is read out, the character data is also read out and stored in memory.
The character data is recorded in a plurality of different languages such as English over a plurality of blocks, and data items including the title of each track, artist name, etc. are recorded in each block in each different language. Accordingly, when the number of languages and data items to be read out is large, a large memory area must be secured, which requires the use of an expensive microcomputer having a large internal memory capacity.
Further, when reading out the character data recorded in the lead-in area and storing the readout data in memory, it has traditionally been practiced to read out only the starting block for storage or to read out the data sequentially, starting from the starting block, and to store the data in memory if the memory space is available. There has therefore been the problem that, even when there is a subsequent block that can be acquired, such subsequent data is not acquired.